Speech recognition systems have received increased attention lately and are becoming popular. Speech recognition technology is being used more and more in a wide range of technology areas ranging from security systems and automated response systems to a variety of electronic devices such as computers.
Conventional speech recognition systems are also used in car navigation systems as a command input device. Previously, users of car navigation systems typically entered the destination address and other control information into the car navigation system using text input devices such as a keyboard or a touch sensitive screen. However, these text input devices are inconvenient and dangerous to use when driving the car, since they require visual interaction with the driver and thus interfere with the driver's ability to drive. In contrast, speech recognition systems are more convenient and safer to use with car navigation systems, since they do not require visual interaction for the driver when commands are input to the car navigation system.
Conventional speech recognition systems typically attempted to recognize speech by processing the speech with the speech recognition system once and analyzing the entire speech based on a single pass. These conventional speech recognition systems had a disadvantage that they had a high error rate and frequently failed to recognize the speech or incorrectly recognized the speech. As such, car navigation systems using such conventional speech recognition systems would frequently fail to recognize the speech or incorrectly recognize the speech, leading to wrong locations or providing unexpected responses to the user. Furthermore, conventional speech recognition systems were not able to use information on the location of the vehicle in speech recognition of addresses, although using such location information in speech recognition may enhance the accuracy of speech recognition.
Therefore, there is a need for an enhanced speech recognition system that can recognize speech reliably and accurately. There is also a need for an enhanced speech recognition system that utilizes location information in speech recognition.